View full sizeThe Oregonian/2010Chef Philippe Boulot in his kitchen at the Multnomah Athletic Club. Boulot told The Oregonian Monday he will officially leave the Heathman, the restaurant he took over in 1994 and helped put on the culinary map.

Chef Philippe Boulot is officially leaving the Heathman, the restaurant he took over nearly two decades ago and helped mold into a Portland institution.

"I'm doing less and less," Boulot told The Oregonian on Monday. " I'm just going to focus on operating the club, with its 17,000 active members and three full restaurants."

The French-born Boulot, who once worked for culinary titan Joel Robuchon, took over the Heathman kitchen from Greg Higgins in 1994. Over the next 15 years, he helped put the restaurant on the culinary map, and, along with Higgins, Cory Schreiber, Vitaly Paley and the crew at Zefiro, helped forge Portland's reputation as a farm-to-table dining destination. Boulot says their work gave younger chefs the "platform they continue to build off of today: working with farmers, working locally."

Along the way the restaurant's yearly revenue grew from about $2 million to nearly $7 million today, he says.

Earlier this year, Boulot was made an officer in the French Ordre National du Mérite Agricole for his work in furthering French cooking abroad.

Boulot isn't sure he would have taken the Heathman job if it were set up the way it is today.

"It's a different job from when I took it," he says. "There's a new company that bought it. They are very sharp financially. It's not the free-spirit type of world that I like to work for."

For now, Boulot says he'll focus on staying out of the spotlight and furthering improvements at the MAC.

"Old chefs are a little bird in the winter, you don't see them anymore," he says. "It's a tough job. Eventually you want to buy a house and have a car and send your kids to college."